‘They can fly’: The Postcolonial Black Body in Nalo Hopkinson’s Speculative Short Fiction

Abstract

Caribbean-Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson prefaces one of her short stories in the collection Skin Folk (2001) with the following lines of poetry, written by her father, artist Slade Hopkinson: ‘These are the latitudes of ex-colonized, of degradation still unmollified’ (183). Hopkinson, using the flexibility afforded by speculative fiction, symbolizes this degradation physically through her characters’ bodies in her short stories. Each of her protagonists must overcome their perceived or real physical imperfections in order to achieve some sort of internal balance and happiness, or as Hopkinson puts it in the preface, ‘whatever burdens their skins bear, once they remove them […] they can fly’ (1). In each case, the degradation and physical deformity can be traced back to injuries caused by their postcolonial condition. Using the story ‘A Habit of Waste’ as a central basis of the analysis, this essay will outline the different ways Hopkinson interrogates and problematizes the postcolonial condition through the body.